Welcome to the FieldTrip website

FieldTrip is the MATLAB software toolbox for MEG, EEG and iEEG analysis, which is released free of charge as open source software under the GNU general public license. FieldTrip is developed by members and collaborators of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Please cite the reference paper when you have used FieldTrip in your study.

Robert Oostenveld, Pascal Fries, Eric Maris, and Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen. FieldTrip: Open Source Software for Advanced Analysis of MEG, EEG, and Invasive Electrophysiological Data. Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, 2011; 2011:156869.

To get started, head over to the getting started documentation and the tutorials.

Latest release

The latest code developments can be tracked in detail on GitHub.

16 September, 2024

FieldTrip version 20240916 has been released with the following improvements.

  • first basic working implementation of AMM and SSS for cleaning of SQUID- and OPM-based MEG data
  • improvements in reading and writing header info for the BrainVision Core data format
  • faster reading of ASCII formatted BrainVision Core data files
  • implemented ft_baddata, in line with ft_rejectvisual but for single trial/channel traces
  • improved detection of the fdt/dat file that accompanies the EEGLAB set
  • support for the computation of forward models with dipoli for windows
  • various small improvements and fixes

See GitHub for the detailed list of updates.

Recent citations

These are recent citations on Pubmed, you can find a more complete list on Google Scholar.

A multichannel electrophysiological approach to noninvasively and precisely record human spinal cord activity

Nierula B, Stephani T, Bailey E, Kaptan M, Pohle LM, Horn U, Mouraux A, Maess B, Villringer A, Curio G, Nikulin VV, Eippert F PLOS Biology, 2024 Oct 31; 22(10):e3002828.

Binaural beats at 0.25 Hz shorten the latency to slow-wave sleep during daytime naps

Fan Z, Zhu Y, Suzuki C, Suzuki Y, Watanabe Y, Watanabe T, Abe T Scientific Reports, 2024 Oct 30; 14:26062.

Neurophysiology of Effortful Listening: Decoupling Motivational Modulation from Task Demands

Kraus F, Ross B, Herrmann B, Obleser J The Journal of Neuroscience, 2024 Oct 30; 44(44):e0589242024.

Social bonding through shared experiences: the role of emotional intensity

Chung V, Mennella R, Pacherie E, Grezes J Royal Society Open Science, 2024 Oct 30; 11(10):240048.

Randomized crossover trial on motor and non-motor outcome of directional deep brain stimulation in Parkinson’s disease

Gharabaghi A, Cebi I, Leavitt D, Scherer M, Bookjans P, Brunnett B, Milosevic L, Weiss D NPJ Parkinson’s Disease, 2024 Oct 26; 10:204.

News and announcements

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6 September 2024

Robert is attending and will give a keynote at the 2024 Belt and Road International Conference on Advancing Population Brain Health through Brain-Apparatus Communication in Chengdu, China. Linked to this is the Annual Assembly of the Global Brain Consortium with an online program on Zoom featuring various symposia and a number of keynotes by Aina Puce, Bradley Voytek, Paolo Rossini, Steven Luck, Viktor Jirsa, and Mahnaz Arvaneh. You still might be able to sign up for the online event that takes place this weekend.

29 August 2024

Robert and Jan-Mathijs have traveled to Sydney to attend Biomag 2024. We are enjoying lively social interactions and discussions with our friends and colleagues, and listening to interesting scientific stuff. The picture shows Robert in the ‘startblokken’ for his contribution to the pre-conference OPM workshop.

5 June 2024

FieldTrip Cheatsheet

Jim McKay has created a Cheatsheet for FieldTrip that summarizes all the data formats, routines, and configuration options in a PDF file. You can see an example page here.

This FieldTrip Cheatsheet is FREE to all subscribers of The FUNNI Pages newsletter. Click this link to join this community for functional neuroimaging and then you can request the cheatsheet be sent to your email by clicking this link.

3 May 2024

Mats presents “reproducescript” in JOSS podcast

Mats van Es was interviewed by Arfon Smith and Abby Cabunoc Mayes for the JOSSCast, a podcast about using open source to accelerate research. Mats explains how the reproducescript option can be used with all FieldTrip functions to generate a standardized and linear analysis script that is easy to share, as explained in our recent paper Reducing the efforts to create reproducible analysis code with FieldTrip. Furthermore, they discuss MATLAB and Python, and how to reduce barriers for sharing analysis code.

You can listen to the podcast here on Spotify.

6 March 2024

The Neuro – Irv and Helga Cooper Foundation Open Science Prizes 2024

The Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital has launched the 2024 edition for the Open Science Prizes! These prestigious awards celebrate groundbreaking projects that promote Open Science in the field of neuroscience. Check out the details on how you can apply.

Last year the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) steering group was awarded the International Prize, perhaps this year your Open Science project gets selected!

26 February 2024

We will present a tutorial at the Workshop on Intracranial Recordings in humans, Epilepsy, DBS (WIRED) at ICM in Paris from 13th to the 15th of March 2024. The FieldTrip tutorial will happen in the afternoon of the 13th.

To attend the hands-on tutorials, participants will have to register here and bring their own laptops.

15 February 2024

From about 2009 we used a locally hosted Bugzilla server as “issue tracker” to maintain and distribute to-do lists and supports the follow-up communication between developers and users. Since about 2016 we moved on to GitHub for project management and issue tracking. We would occasionally still look up some old Bugzilla discussion regarding features, code design choices and bugs.

However, due to resource limitations and security concerns we decided to discontinue the Bugzilla server. As of now, https://bugzilla.fieldtriptoolbox.org contains a read-only archived copy of the bug reports and discussions. All links from the website and from the email archive to bugs on Bugzilla should still work, so the details of past work are not lost.